


a few steps short of poetry

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Established Relationship, Experimental Style, F/F, Post-Canon, Romance, Vignette, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 15:16:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3655125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the after years, Josephine and Cassandra wed devotion, obligation, and, after a fashion, one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a few steps short of poetry

**Author's Note:**

> The incomparably lovely evandrelical drew a scene from this story: [here](http://evandrelical.tumblr.com/post/115220362902). :D

When Leliana leaves, called to the Chantry’s leadership, the quartet they make with Cullen--plus the Inquisitor, minus Cassandra when it’s time for another field venture, the arrangement being flexible--loses a mainstay, a confidante, a friend. Varric fills in for a time, but his heart is across the Waking Sea in Kirkwall that is gradually, stone by stone, rising from the ash and fire of the mage-templar war.

Cassandra stays. With the Seekers gone, the Inquisition has become her purpose. She’s always been diligent in her duty, and prone to alleviating her heartache with generous helpings of work. Sometimes Josephine tries to convince her otherwise. _My dear, if you must go, Cullen has the troops in hand. You need not be a general if you must be a Seeker again. I’d miss you, but..._

At that point that Cassandra hushes her with a kiss or a gesture, the time not yet ripe for this discussion. If duty binds her to Skyhold then so does Josephine, and the unexpected gift of love in a life that she’d been ready to dedicate to obligation and season with friendship. Camaraderie sustained and continues to sustain her, but Josephine is a blessing, a breath of warmth, a light in her days. She leans on the words of others to even begin to find the right metaphor. Josephine, not so secretly, enjoys the attempts even if Cassandra is never quite happy with the nuances.

As the Inquisition comes out of its fraught wartime beginnings to cement a place for itself in Thedas, Josephine, too, stays. Nobles and monarchs tilt their ear at her smooth suggestion. She vets her young attachés--not so much younger than she herself--for the most promising to send to the courts of Free Marcher princes and Fereldan teyrns. The imperial court of Orlais, of course, already has a liaison. When Josephine and Vivienne set to weaving intrigue together, anyone with enough sense to fill a thimble ducks their head and stays on their best behaviour. Her days are filled with letters and receptions, but she may still have the right collar sprinkled with the right perfume to cause a screaming scandal eight hundred miles away.

They both ride in and out of Skyhold. Cassandra never learned not to lead from the front, and she always gives of herself what she’d ask of others. Josephine wages her campaigns in words, but sometimes she must accompany those words for the best impact.

They exchange the forge loft and Josephine’s unassuming bedroom for shared quarters when the main keep repairs are completed at last. Two itinerant lives blend into one in practice if not in formality--though sometimes Josephine thinks on this. She turns thirty. Her siblings mature, in notches and fractions, but she lies awake at nights, until Cassandra’s weary, soothing hand in her hair and down her back coaxes her into rest.

Under lock and key, Cassandra keeps the Book of Secrets.

It is spring when Josephine’s parents approach her, via letter, in loving and stringent terms. 

She is the Montilyet heir. She must marry. The Inquisition is a fine bit of prestige, career advancement, and connections, but Antiva City will not wait for her forever.

Josephine’s mother is the best mother anyone could ever have, but her sense of scale skews hard towards family. Josephine knows; she must consider the world, but where does it all begin if not with family?

Cassandra entrusts two old friends with her secret. The Inquisitor, more tactful than timorous these days, left the choice to Cassandra. She will bear her burdens. However, she has had half a decade to ponder her lost, fallen brethren and feed stubborn hope with rumour and hearsay.

She writes to Leliana, one of the few who still call her by that name, if only ever in private. Then she takes the book, the cracked leather cover stamped with the sun's circle and the unblinking eye, and shows it to Cullen.

Josephine broaches the subject in the solar, on the cushions of the window seat with her legs bent over Cassandra’s lap. _My mother wrote to me--_

Cassandra drops her poetry book, knits her brows, listens as intently as only she might, and admits, _I wrote to Leliana._

They’ve never truly mastered the art of the quarrel. Josephine flexes and flows, and Cassandra cannot and will not point the force of her fury at what she treasures most in the world. So they sit, hand-fast, and they speak, long after the hearth has burned low.

Love, as all powers given to people, must sometimes bend.

They don’t part in the courtyard as would be usual. They ride together as far as the port in Jader. They make love for goodbyes and promises in a narrow inn bed, and Josephine laughs so she won't cry, and because if she wants Cassandra to have one glimpse of her to tarry with her in the coming months, she’d rather that it be her joy in Cassandra.

She does not permit herself to think of more than the next step. They kiss on the dock on a cool summer morning, the sea in mist and shadow and the wind in the west. Cassandra kisses Josephine’s knuckles and does not swear to return. If she did, she’d never go, because the only certain way to see someone again is to never part.

 _I love you_ , she says instead, as another certainty.

Then they each sail to the east and to the west, to the Grand Cathedral in Val Royeaux and to the Montilyet estate outside Antiva City.

They each argue their case with people they esteem in the highest measure. Cassandra detests the asking, but Leliana is well used to her bluntness--relishes it, in a way, after the years of subtlety and subterfuge. _You know she played a part in why I never asked you to be my Right Hand._

 _I know_ , Cassandra says, refuses to feel guilty and then feels guilty all the same.

She gave herself to the Chantry for two decades of her life. Even though a Seeker is not _forbidden_ to love or to marry, Seekers are chosen from those with the greatest dedication, the most honed skill. The title is worn for life. It seldom leaves room for worldly attachments.

And Josephine meets her parents for the first time in years, falls upon her mother in a great sobby hug, kisses her father’s cheek and lets him stroke her hair in memory of a childhood spent in this house. Sweet Andraste, they are both going grey, the cypresses in the garden are overshadowing the house, and the garden wall has a new hole in it.

Her parents have also drawn up a list of suitors for her. _Josephine, darling, it’s long past time_. Her mother doesn’t employ the _grandchildren_ word or the _family heritage_ line. Their absence doesn’t blunt the reality.

The last years have been a wild, breathless adventure. Josephine may have had the most sedate tasks among the Inquisition, but she still is the head diplomat of a maverick organisation, risen to power on a catastrophe and still ascending.

 _Give it all to Yvette._ The words lurk beneath her teeth, sometimes.

But she _is_ Josephine Montilyet, ambassador of the Inquisition, and an Antivan always has her ways.

She begs her mother to wait until the wine harvest. If Josephine has no solution that will save the family fortune and its good name by then, her parents can write back to those suitors. If they won’t wait a few months for a lady’s favour, they aren’t worthwhile in the first place.

Then she sallies forth into the vast law library in Antiva City, and prepares to lay siege to its edicts until they yield.

When Cassandra steps onto the docks of the Antivan capital for the first time in her life, on the last week of Kingsway, in fine and sheer autumn weather, Josephine almost upsets a silk merchant’s stack of bolts in her hurry to reach her. There have been letters. There have been sleepless nights and damp pillows. They've been apart for months.

She’s talking as Cassandra embraces her--stops talking for the span of an ardent, breathtaking kiss--and goes on, in a tumble of hope and elation until Cassandra cuts her off with two fingers on her lips.

 _I am reforming the Seekers_ , she says, soft as a feather, solid as a stone.

 _I know_ , says Josephine. _And I must choose a spouse._

Before Cassandra can even draw a breath, before the joy of their reunion can be scratched and soured, Josephine takes her hands in her own and says, _And if you would honour me so, my dear, I’d have it be you._

She tells her fostered children this story for years to come--in select parts, naturally. How her beloved wife flushed from throat to ear on a thronged dock, then spun her around and muttered _how_ and _dare I ask_ and _yes_ in her wind-tangled hair.

What happened next, she does not share. That is for her and Cassandra alone.

The Antivans, in their devotion to sense and utility as well as passion and honour, have long since understood that comfort and good grace, heart and reason, must live side by side if they are to live at all. So--though the clause is not often invoked--they make allowance for two people who wish to share their wine, their bread, their means, in mutual peace and agreement.

Her parents must suffer her going to live in Orlais. Josephine persists with a softness of her own and a purpose learned from the woman she loves. Cassandra is, she insists, Nevarran royalty. If anything, Josephine is the one with aspirations above her station. In the end, her father sighs, puts a hand on her shoulder, and smiles with sorrow and pride up at his eldest, brightest child.

From the last vestiges of the scattered templars, Cassandra chooses the most promising warriors. The White Spire will stand empty no longer. When her first initiates are ready, bodies and souls prepared and poised, she cracks open the Book of Secrets and tells them the cost.

Some of them understand. Others are outraged. She lets them all be what they must--among all the other things, Josephine has given her patience--explains and cajoles, and breaks three training dummies in the yard afterwards.

At some point, there is a house. One built in the sun and by the sea, for the things Josephine loves best, with spaces for studying and sparring and for friends coming through.

There are long consultations with the new ambassador for the Inquisition, picked by Josephine with painstaking care. There is the inevitable influx of administration around the new Seekers, and Cassandra groaning over her penmanship.

There is also planting a garden, with rows of dragonthorn and embrium, swishing saplings of apple and plum, and a swing hung from the old oak tree. Once a week, Josephine declares, they will sleep in and walk to the city for late breakfast. It is the best of intentions, and they even make it work every other week or so.

 _One wine, one bread_ , Cassandra turns the Antivan phrase over in her mouth. All the spinning connections of Val Royeaux at Josephine’s fingertips, the rise of House Montilyet in Orlais overseen by her own eye. The budding Seekers, aligned to their time-tarnished ideals once again, an hour's ride away under Cassandra’s watchful guidance.

It is a few steps short of poetry, but it is a life in the world, girded by duty and by love.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't often do experimental dialogue tags or omniscient third person, but they suggested themselves for this story. Feel free to tell me what you think. ♥


End file.
